The present invention generally relates to telecommunications, and in particular, to caller identification information.
Telecommunications systems incorporating text-to-speech synthesizers for generating audible caller information from textual data are known. U.S. Pat. No. 5,796,806 discloses an advanced intelligent network (AIN) that incorporates text-to-speech technology for presenting spoken caller information to subscribers. In this network, caller ID information, such as the caller""s name and number, ordinarily presented visually to a subscriber using a special display device, is synthesized to voice information that is audibly presented to the subscriber. The textual caller information provided to the text-to-speech synthesizer is stored in phonebook-like databases.
A problem not addressed by the ""806 patent is the format mismatch between the caller information databases and the input strings to the text-to-speech synthesizer. The phonebook-like textual databases are not optimized to be used as text-to-speech input. Generally, caller information in these databases is abbreviated and truncated into a compact format to reduce storage requirements. Consequently, providing compacted caller information directly to a text-to-speech synthesizer can compromise the quality of the audible output. Thus, there is a need for a spoken caller identification system that improves audible output by accounting for the formatting differences between caller databases and commercially available text-to-speech synthesizers.